


this bloody tyrant, time

by Arteluna



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Mentions of alcohol, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-17 23:56:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19965340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arteluna/pseuds/Arteluna
Summary: Root and her belief, as the years go by.





	this bloody tyrant, time

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Shakespeare's _Sonnet 16_

You’re eleven, and your mother has stopped going to church, but you still go. You’ve always been a devoted follower, after all. 

You walk the mile and a half by yourself. When you walk through the woods, you kick at stones and watch the shadows and think. When you walk through Bishop proper, you avoid conversations and try to pretend that people aren’t staring at you. You know the rumors already, and if you get asked one more time how your mother’s feeling, you’re going to scream.

You’re trying hard not to mind what people think. Hanna's good at that. She always meets you at the door to the First Bishop Presbyterian Church, and even though she’s two years older and has so many other friends she could be hanging out with, she always takes your hand as you walk inside. You pretend you just tolerate this, as best you can. 

And maybe here is where your sense of belonging and divinity first get tangled together, and tie themselves to less of a concept and more of a concrete being. Hanna leads you to wherever her parents are sitting, generally near the front. Her father doesn’t seem to like you, but Hanna isn’t close to him, so his opinion doesn’t mater. When her mother smiles at you, you make an effort to smile back. 

You’re not quite sure when you stopped going to church for God. The pastor might say that made you a bad person, if he knew, but you don’t care.

*******

You’re twelve, and you’ve figured out the combination to your mother’s gun safe. It isn’t very difficult (your house number, not a birthday, nothing super sentimental, or easy to forget), and the first time you get it open, you sit back on your heels and just stare. 

Your fingers leave marks when you brush the dusty black metal – your mother hasn’t opened the safe in years. Two weeks later, she takes the gun out during one of her more extreme episodes, and, once the danger has passed, you change the safe’s settings and dump all the alcohol in the house down the sink. She’ll get more, of course, but the act feels good, like taking a stand. Your hands are shaking.

********

You’re thirteen, and the gun is heavy in your lap. You know all the parts – the safety is currently clicked on, so even if you curl your finger around the trigger, it won’t go off. You picture the noise it would make. You picture shooting Trent Russell – right between the eyes, just like in the movies Hanna’s mother didn’t let her watch. 

But no, that won't be right. Nobody listened to you, but they wouldn’t have any trouble believing that a strange little girl, mad with grief (or just mad in general), shot an innocent man. You’d go to jail, and as miserable as you are, as empty as you feel, you can’t bring yourself to want that. You feel dark instead: something deep inside fading, or maybe rotting away. 

You’ll find some other way to kill him – a way that won’t get you caught. You go back to the library; they have the only computers you have access to, outside of school. You look Ms. Barbara right in the eyes. 

And sometimes you picture killing her too. 

*******

You’re fourteen, and there’s a gun tucked into the waistband of your jeans and a bus ticket stuffed in your pocket. You dyed your hair brown in the bathroom sink before you left – while your mother was still passed out on the couch downstairs – and while it’s a bit patchy, it was enough to make you cry when you saw yourself in the mirror. You look so much like her. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

(In a few more years, your hair will darken on its own, and you won’t be quite sure if that’s irony or something different. Something worse – the universe’s way of telling you it wasn’t supposed to be Sam who survived. You don’t believe in God anymore.)

You ride your bike to the bus stop in the next town over, to reduce the risk of somebody recognizing you. Your mother won’t report you missing – she probably won’t even notice you’re gone for at least a few days – and it’s summer, so no teachers will recognize that something’s amiss. You push the bike into a ditch a half-mile from your destination and halfheartedly cover it with branches. 

The trip is long (seven hours) and you pretend to sleep for most of it. The gun is pressing into the small of your back; when you go over bumps, you can feel the extra box of ammunition you stuffed in your backpack shift. When the woman with the curly black hair and the little girl sitting on her lap asks your name, you say Hanna, smiling as sincerely as you can manage, though here is where your bared teeth begin to look like a threat. 

Just for a few weeks, Hanna isn’t dead.

******

You’re fifteen, and you sit in the back of the classroom, doodling the word “Root” along the edges of your notebook, over and over and over, until it’s just a pretty pattern of lines. The teacher calls on “Samantha”, and it takes you a while to notice. She’s looking at you, and you feel vaguely nauseous, something shifting inside. 

_int main ()_  
void samantha_groves()  
EXIT_FAILURE 

You look up, and the class is staring. 

You smile. “Yes?”

******

You’re sixteen, and it’s Hana’s birthday. They’re holding a memorial in the church; you’re not going to go. You sit alone in your room; it grows dimmer around you. Your nails are long enough to click against the keys. You’ve painted them black, with nail polish you found in your room, under your bed. You can’t quite remember where it came from. Maybe it was your mother’s. Maybe…

The lines of code blur together, and you blink, irritated at the tears you find. You stop typing, fingertips instead drumming against the warm, smooth metal. You’re not sure when you last ate. You’re not sure if you care. Even your little, less-than-legal side projects aren’t enough of a distraction.

Especially since Russell’s not dead. Who knew drug dealers took so long?

You try to focus on your breathing, on the faint hum of the fans, and tap your fingers harder, until it starts to hurt. You open up another code file. #ROOT, you type, even though it doesn’t do anything. Then, _help me._

_Please._

(You don’t know what you expect to happen. Whom you expect to hear you.)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure if the code is at all accurate, but I tried my best! The idea is that Root is trying to call a function, and is finding that it's not there.


End file.
